


Temporal Reversion

by Riathel



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bad BDSM Etiquette, Body Horror, F/F, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scenes, Multi, Post-Episode: s12e01-02 Spyfall, Psychological Torture, Suicidal Thoughts, The Timeless Child (Doctor Who) - Freeform, Time Lord Biology (Doctor Who)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:07:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22335301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riathel/pseuds/Riathel
Summary: “Leaving him in hell would have been too kind a fate for either of them.”After Spyfall, the Doctor makes another detour before Orphan 55. Yaz, Graham, and Ryan suspect her new open book routine isn’t as open as she’d like them to believe.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 66





	Temporal Reversion

**Author's Note:**

> Heed the tags.

Leaving him in hell would have been too kind a fate for either of them.

She's always been the best of him. He's always been the worst of her. Maybe that’s something that isn’t meant to change.

—

It’s only day three of the Doctor’s new truth regime and the constant openness is beginning to grate on everyone’s nerves: especially the Doctor’s. It’s in the tightness around her eyes, the sharp squint at nothing as Yaz asks if she’s ever been married before the Doctor forces a grin and says, “oh, yeah, loads of times, love a good wedding!”

The next tell is that tiny twist to her upper lip. Ryan wants to know if she’s got a dad. “I always found them tricky, dads, as, as a concept,” she says, her face crumpled in a parody of deep thought. Then she concedes. It’s the closest she can get to the truth. “I think so. Maybe. Hard to tell. Lots of cousins, though.”

Their trust in her has been shaken. But it will smooth over. It always does. They take their half-truths and the insincere apologies, and they think themselves her friends.

There’s nothing more to do than watch the same story bleed to another unsatisfying ending. 

Again, again, again, again.

—

By day eight, she’s visibly uncomfortable. The others have gone home, given up, gone to check that their paltry, insignificant lives haven’t left them behind. But Yaz, sweet, dogged, _clever_ Yaz won't let the Doctor go on this one.

“Your home planet,” she begins, and doesn't see the way the Doctor wilts before the word: “Gallifrey.”

Yaz doesn't know how to look. She doesn’t know how to see what he sees. But the paleness to the Doctor’s skin, the sallow tint of grief — it’s a fine wine. She grows lovelier with each fresh batch of agony.

“Ah yeah,” the Doctor says quickly, too quickly, “Kasterborous constellation, made up of seventeen suns — you know, I never realised until your solar system just how many suns that was. Sixteen more than you lot, for starters! Then again, there's a constellation with four-hundred-and-twenty- _nine_ suns only a few trillion lightyears away from that—”

“Doctor,” Yaz says, firmly, in her best police voice, “Why won’t you take us there?”

For a second, the Doctor just stares at her, mouth parted. It’s only moments, but time is a fickle servant to them. He can stretch that second out into eternities, laying bare every microexpression flaring behind the Doctor’s eyes. What little hope she has left of fixing this neatly, cleanly, fading. The slow, familiar steel of resigned sorrow in her smile.

“Maybe tomorrow.”

—

It’s another twelve days before she comes. Or maybe not. Maybe it's longer. Years. Minutes. Centuries. Seconds.

He doesn’t know if it matters.

He doesn’t know if he cares.

—

“Is this what you wanted?” he asks her.

She doesn’t look at him. She’s fiddling with something in the corner. Some dusty piece of junk in her relic of a ship.

“Years ago,” he presses. “You remember.”

“Do I?” she mutters.

“You said you’d keep me,” the Master continues. “Is this what you meant?” He rattles the chains. Grins, even though he feels like snapping her neck. “Dwarf star alloy, nicely done, _love_.”

She flinches. Just a little, just a twitch of her hand, but it's there. It's something.

It’s winning. He’s winning.

“You know what I’m remembering,” he says, slowly, because if he talks any faster he’ll tear them both apart, and she’s not close enough for that yet, “I’m remembering what fun we had that year. Are we going to have fun again, Doctor?”

“Depends,” she replies, that thin wisp of a grin ghosting her face. It doesn’t reach her eyes. Neither can he, unless she gets a little closer. The urge to lunge at her keeps rising in his chest with nothing to meet it. Just an endless want, _want_ , want, _want_. It’s sending him madder and madder with every pulse of his hearts.

The chessboard lands on the table between them, pieces rattling in the cheap pine box. For an instant, the drumming of his double-pulse in his throat is overwhelming, thudding, echoing, and he forces his mouth to ask why she’s lying to him, why she’s always lied to him, why she won’t tell him that she can hear it.

He says nothing. His mouth stays shut, cut in a sneer.

“White or black?” she asks.

Scream or sob. Live or die. Kill or be killed.

“You really don’t remember, do you,” he tuts. His voice doesn’t waver, but the cold grip around his vocal cords is strangling. She mustn't know. No vulnerability. No weakness. “Getting slow-witted in your old age.”

The Doctor huffs out a sigh, rolling her lovely, distant eyes. Perhaps he’ll smear them across his skin. Press her inside of him in a way that’s more real, more meaningful than anything else could be. He aches for her. “White, then. Gimme a sec, I’ll get it set up.”

The contents of the box get upended onto the table and scatter everywhere, all over the floor, scuttling into dark corners. Mess. Disorganisation. Disorder. When it’s not his perfectly crafted chaos, it feels ugly, hostile, some deliberate slight against him. She must know how this hurts. How can she not feel it? Doesn’t she ache, too? Why else is he alive, in this universe, in this TARDIS, if she isn’t filled with pain and looking to soothe it too, in the only way they’ve ever known how?

She hasn’t touched his mind since Paris. Her own is smooth, finally impervious to his telepathic insinuations. It’s only taken her a dozen lifetimes to master what most children learned in their playpens. And yet it’s another frustration, another barrier, more pointless distractions when all he wants is connection. Communion.

 _Contact_ , he wills onto her. He presses into her grooves, seeking entry, a crack, old pathways, anything; he’s forceful and patient at once, cajoling and commanding, he needs it, he needs this, he needs her.

The Doctor gives him a curious smile, like she can’t feel the depth of his frantic emptiness, and says, “Don’t have a full set, but! I do have these LEGO substitutes. Look,” she holds up a misshapen yellow figure, paint worn to nothing, “he can be your knight.”

He won’t beg. He can’t beg.

“That’s a policeman, not a fucking knight,” he says, then cackles because it’s all uproariously funny, and then tries to dislocate his wrists with the chains for want of a razor blade. She watches him for a moment, with something approaching concern but never quite reaching it.

In five minutes, his wrists are nothing but beginning to chafe, and the Doctor has set up the rest of her ramshackle excuse for a chess set. Half of her pawns have been substituted with spare buttons, one of which is freshly ripped from the inside lining of her coat. She eyes his buttons speculatively; decides against it when he snaps at her curious, curious fingers with his sharp, sharp teeth.

He tugs at the chains again, testing this time, watching for her reaction. This regeneration is so superficially enthusiastic; all the real meat is buried deep. He’ll cut it out of her if it kills him. “Have I earned enough good boy points to have my hands back?” he asks, sweetly.

“No,” she says, dismissive, absent. She’s considering the board with a frown. It reminds him of her seventh regeneration. He was almost proud of that one. The chess master, always scheming, conniving, twisting, warping, just out of reach.

Her frown flickers to him when he kicks the board off the table. The pieces don’t land as far as he wanted them to. He wanted them to become shrapnel, to embed into them both, to tear, and hurt in a way that makes sense. In a way that he can control, that he can replicate.

“What, d’you want Cluedo instead?” She’s still frowning at him, her careful, dark eyes trying to pick him apart. “I’ve got checkers, too. Backgammon?”

“Strip poker,” he suggests, all smiles.

She wrinkles her nose. “Go fish.”

“Russian roulette.”

Her sigh shouldn’t hurt. It never has before, but now it aches in between his hearts. Is it her sigh? Or is it her? Is _she_ hurting him, is this all some long game of torture? Is that all it ever was, the vault, the promises, leaving him to _die_ —

“No,” the Doctor says, quietly. “No, it wasn’t. It isn’t.”

For a second he’s beyond himself with fury, thinking she’s forced her way into his mind, choking down the bile that rises at the concept. How could he have been tricked? His throat clicks, bobbing. Hoarse, scratchy. It jars with his silent reality.

Then the anger surrenders his hostage memory back to him. He’s been screaming his thoughts at her this whole time, the rage and hurt inside of him too much to contain.

This is worse than the time he came back half-dying, nearly out of his mind with hunger; at least then he had understood the mechanics and the biology of his failings. This is formless. Shapeless. Nameless.

Timeless.

It takes a moment for him to blink away the flare of the genetic memory that grips him. When he claws his way back, pushes down the primal terror, the certainty that he has stumbled onto things greater than he can understand, he’s on the ground, sobbing, disoriented. Unlike before, she’s there, her arms wrapped around him. Stroking his back, purring sweet nothings in a tongue they have both tried to kill.

“Why won’t it stop?” he whispers in English. Gallifreyan is inherently repulsive to him, now. The very thought of it sends a sharp pain lancing through his temporal lobe. He feels nothing. Nothing but the numb and the cold and the fear and the forest floor decomposing around him, death, dying, surrounded by corpses of leaves as he burns out. He’s there and here at the same time, male and female, dead and alive. “Doctor? Why won't it _stop?_ ”

“I’ve got you,” she says. The leaves pass through her soundlessly, as if she’s not real. It makes no sense, but his dear Doctor never has. Never will. “I’m here. You’ll be okay.”

“Why won’t it stop?” he repeats. The question stalls in his throat a fourth time. Chokes around the beat of his hearts, thrumming, and the tears that come, disconnected from the rest of him.

“Master,” she says his name like it might fix him, her voice all tight and trembling. She’s afraid, his Doctor. That doesn’t seem right. “I’m here.” She shushes the furious, animal howls that burst from him, the screaming that slips into muted sobbing, even as he tries frantically to pin down the parts of his nervous system engaged in senseless meltdowns.

 _Make it stop_ , he tries to beg. His voice contorts along with his body into unnatural shapes. _Doctor, make it stop_. Her cool hands press at him. Trying to anchor. Not managing to do anything more than temporarily distract.

Without looking into her mind, he knows she hopes he will wear himself to exhaustion before he can hurt anyone; least of all himself.

They both know she has no answer for him.

—

Without a functioning temporal stem, the Master has no point of reference for dates and times, objectively, subjectively or relatively.

His birthright as a Time Lord has been scoured from him. The wound is deep, fierce, pandimensional. Transtemporal. Fresh and ancient all at once. All this much he worked out before. He only remembers each time he recalculates it, the memories staggered one step out of sync. This is the worst part of it, remembering. Because it comes with the realisation that he will forget. That this new/old information will be pulled from him, again. He will fight with his considerable skill to hold onto it, but it will slip through his mind’s grasp like fickle grains of sand. Sometimes it happens slowly, when he pours as much of his frantic energy into plugging the gaps as he can. More and more it is happening quickly.

He has never been one to surrender easily, but the futility of this saps his resolve.

The Doctor retrieves the chess board on Tuesday. He isn’t sure which Tuesday, but it has the taste of Tuesday.

He feels adrift. His headache will not fade.

He has no point of reference for dates and times. His birthright as a Time Lord has been scoured from him. Each time he probes at the wound, timelines corrode in copper-sparks underneath his exploration. It scalds him to touch them, and yet he can't help himself; his temporal lobe is robust and necrotising. He explains this to her, patiently, because she does not want to listen to it, or to him. She says that she knows. But he has the hidden advantage: he knows there is nothing in all of her experiences that could compare to this.

Then he explains it to her again, because he cannot claw out the asymptotic pity in her eyes. Not yet. She’s too distant for that. But she’ll lower her guard eventually. She has to.

The Master will be waiting. He has nothing else to do, now, nothing but to retreat to the familiar, try to stave off his temporal void, and wait for his best enemy to make a mistake.


End file.
